Miyake Modern - Japanese designer Issey Miyake - Interview

Art in America, Feb, 1999 by Joan Simon

After interviewing Miyake, and subsequently seeing his collection at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts; after research outings and window-shopping at his boutiques in Paris; and after visits to "Addressing the Century: 100 Years of Art and Fashion" in London and to the Kuramata show in Paris, I wanted to know still more. About Miyake's men's clothes, for example, in comparison with the women's collections, and in context with his unisex forms, especially those for theater and dance. I also wanted to know more about the influence on Miyake's early development of the liberating down-scale, downtown unisex work clothes of SoHo in the late '60s and early '70s. And I'd like to see full-scale rooms (or sectional details, at least) of the boutique interiors--among them Tadao Ando's design for the men's boutique in Kyoto, and a selection of the innovative Kuramata-designed boutiques.

These aren't the questions that "Making Things" sets out to address, but its successful engagement with the particulars of Miyake's process and products has indeed brought them forth. The fact that "Making Things" whetted curiosity to see a full-blown, critical retrospective is to Miyake's and Cartier's credit.

JOAN SIMON: How did the show "Making Things" come about?

ISSEY MIYAKE: I knew the Fondation Cartier. It's a very free, very fine place to have exhibitions. The plan was to show working as an exhibition.

JS: You've divided the show into three different areas, with different names.

IM: The gallery "Jumping" is so the clothes can move, people can enjoy them, feeling that they are in the clothes in the imagination. And then I wanted to show the work I've done with artists--Yasumasa Morimura, Nobuyoshi Araki, Tim Hawkinson, Cai Guo-Qiang. They also work with physical bodies and energy. A great thing happening now in art is that artists are using the figure, the body, clothing, life. And downstairs is "The Laboratory." Usually the process of making clothing is hidden. For "Making Things" I showed all of this together.

Working with Artists

JS: How do you find your artist collaborators?

IM: I like to go to galleries. Other people give me ideas. If I see something I like, I ask. Then I give the artists the clothes, and I forget about it. OK, I made these clothes--what can they do that can be used in a printed way?.

JS: So the white pleated garments become the basic elements, like a blank page.

IM: Or a canvas. I didn't know Tim Hawkinson very well. I saw a show of his at a gallery, and felt it was strong. I gave him the clothes, and he put everything in one work. He made a quilt. Huge, huge, enormous. Happily, it fits the gallery space here.

JS: I was told that for the quilt he used samples of his collaborations for the Pleats line that were in progress, some of them in the printed stage, some that were shapes, some that were tests--all the working materials the Miyake studio sent out to him. The Pneumatic Quilt (1997) seems more like an art installation than your other collaborations.

IM: I didn't expect it to become like that. It took us about one year.